Working for a County agency

snokerpoker

I recently have landed an interview at a county agency. Anyone have experience working for a county agency versus working as a consultant for a MSP?

I really enjoy working with several different companies as a consultant. One fear I have is working for one agency may bore me to death. Health benefits and retirement plan are much better with the county job.

If anyone has any experience or made this transition i'd like to know how it worked out.

Thanks!

Danielm7

I worked, sort of at a county agency. We had a non-profit that was using space in the local county government complex, which meant we had little funds and were understaffed and running around all the time. My friends all worked 100 feet away, but were county employees. Slow was an understatement. They'd say they weren't bored but they usually took long lunches every day and watched movies and then played FPS games on the network for a good bit of the day, they were lined up at the door at 5 minutes to 4pm every day. I was always surprised that anything even remotely out of their normal day to day involved hiring a consultant to handle it.

Obviously, YMMV, I'm sure other people have had different experiences, but that's what I've seen.

DatabaseHead

Danielm7 wrote: »

I worked, sort of at a county agency. We had a non-profit that was using space in the local county government complex, which meant we had little funds and were understaffed and running around all the time. My friends all worked 100 feet away, but were county employees. Slow was an understatement. They'd say they weren't bored but they usually took long lunches every day and watched movies and then played FPS games on the network for a good bit of the day, they were lined up at the door at 5 minutes to 4pm every day. I was always surprised that anything even remotely out of their normal day to day involved hiring a consultant to handle it.

Obviously, YMMV, I'm sure other people have had different experiences, but that's what I've seen.

Worked on a short termed project for a county position and I noticed the same thing. Everyone was using older desk tops and most employees had one monitor and it wasn't very good one. Funny thing, the pay for the project was quite a bit more relatively speaking so that a huge plus. One of the draw backs, I didn't learn much while working there. I had 2 - 3 task I had too do and that was it.

The employees did the same as you mentioned. E.G. The networking engineer, was seriously a project manager of networking projects. He would call vendors etc when things would break. VM and Systems guy was the same. In reality they should of been called project managers. Kind of weird.

tedjames

I work for a state agency, and we are never bored. We're a staff of four with a tight budget and several hundred users. No time to watch movies... We do get full support from the execs, which is great.

joemysterio

You're in the Bay Area? Don't go to Alameda County.

blatini

Have you tried reaching out to the county's old IT staff for insight?

snokerpoker

The pay for the job is six figures and appears to have better benefits than I currently have. I had a phone interview and it doesn't seem to have the vibe described above. I am waiting to hear back. Either way this is going to be a tough call on my part.

Having good health benefits for my family and an actual retirement plan are very tempting!